BPing is a tiny console-based ping tool with an unusual extra: sound. Sounds odd, but double-click the program and you'll understand immediately.

By default the program immediately pings Google.com and plays a sound (from Space Invaders!) every time a reply arrives. Now you don't need to watch the window to understand what's going on: if replies slow down drastically, or your internet connection goes down, the sounds will also slow or stop and you'll immediately hear that something has changed.

You don't have to live with the defaults. Add a -d switch and BPing only plays a sound when there's no reply. Effectively this means you can leave the program running in a window and it'll alert you when your internet connection goes down, or the monitored resource is unavailable.

There are other switches to specify a custom host name or IP address, to scan your whole network, set the number of pings to use, specify a timeout, use a custom audio file, set audio volume, and more.

Enter BPing /h at the command line to see the full switch list.